Digging into the Texas Freeze using Python and ERA5 zarr data
Texas usually has a subtropical climate with very hot summers and mild winters. Yet, the State was stunned when a short burst of cold air arrived this year in February. This ‘Arctic Chill’ was, as the name suggests, a band of cool air that arrived in Texas from The Arctic. This extreme weather in Texas left dozens of people dead and the freezing temperatures knocked out the power supply for millions of residents. But how rare is the phenomenon? And, has Texas ever experienced temperatures like this before? To answer these questions, we decided to dig into data.
Firstly, a preliminary analysis of the data suggests that, while February 2021 was unusually cold, it was not the first time that Arctic air has hit Texas with freezing temperatures in February. This is visible in the graph below.
The graph above demonstrates that there was outstanding temperatures in 1985 and 2011, as well as 2021. News clippings from 2011 also show that Texas faced power grid disturbances during this time. It is worth noting however, that this February was much colder than any other cold snap, as seen on the image below.
Interestingly, 2010 was very cold on average as well, however minimum temperatures did not drop that low and fortunately the power grid was not severely effected.
The graph below, which compares the month of January across a 40 year time horizon, shows that 1985 saw temperatures that were even colder than February 2021. This graph also demonstrates that January tends to be much colder on average (9.4 °C) than February (11.5 °C).
If you would like to see more graphs from Texas, go and have a look at our Jupyter Notebook. You can use it yourself and even add new graphs. If you do, please share them with us as well.
The question then remains, if Texas has experienced such cold temperatures before and if they have experienced power outages due to cold weather, what exactly happened to the system and what could be done to resolve some of these issues going forwards?
In the Intertrust blog piece this week, we answer these questions. In this blog piece you can read about how better data management and interoperability could improve the situation in Texas going forwards, future-proofing the grid against problems that will arise due to unforeseen weather events.
